Lesson 2: The Tools of the Trade
Tools Of The Trade
“Let’s not blame the bike. Okay? It’s a poor carpenter that blames his shoddy tools for the…Ow! (bleep) Oh! Stupid…cornballing piece of (bleep).”
-Michael Bluth
Why This Is Not A “Tools” Course
In August of 2015, I sat by a pool in Thailand and knocked out my first NFL RotoAcademy courses. Those courses were some of the best DFS pieces I had ever written – and I imagine they are still immensely valuable today. But valuable as they probably still are, they are also entirely unnecessary.
Those courses – one on selecting quarterbacks, one on selecting running backs, and one on selecting pass catchers – were heavily focused on the research you should be doing, the way in which you should be weighing this research, and the way in which you could effectively put this information into action.
By the end of 2015, however, the daily fantasy landscape had shifted. More information was out there than ever before. More research was being done for you; more game theory thoughts were being advanced; and more tools were available to the everyday player.
The “tools” I laid out in those courses – how to assess and value advanced statistics, how to process a matchup, how to gather and properly apply information – is just as important and valuable today as it was back then. But the difference between 2015 and 2017 is that _everyone now knows to look at and value those statistics…_and perhaps even more importantly than that: everyone is gathering and assessing that information for you.
In 2015, if you wanted to know who truly had a great matchup, you had to do the work yourself.
In 2017, you can spend an hour reading the NFL Edge on RotoGrinders Premium, and can dig into Evan Silva’s ‘Matchups’ column on RotoWorld, and can tap into a few other select articles and databases, and can collect the information – in a few short hours – that it would have taken piles of hours to collect before.
Can you still do all the work for yourself? Absolutely.
But you don’t have to anymore!
Why We Are Still Taking A Lesson To Talk About Tools?
Even though others are doing the digging for you these days, you still need to know a few things.
Firstly, you need to know what the tools are. Two years ago, you had to know where to find the tools, and know how to find them; these steps have been cut out for you now. But you still need to understand the tools you are using to build your DFS winnings.
Secondly, you need to realize that with the basic foundation now covered for you (and covered for your competition as well), you can repurpose the time that would previously have been used to gather this information on your own.
To put that another way: If you simply stop at the research you could have stopped at a couple years ago, you will fall behind your competition; everyone has access to the old tools, which means you need to find new tools that can set you apart.
To read the rest of this lesson, you must purchase the course!
